


On Perfection

by MostRemote



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, One-Sided Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:41:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MostRemote/pseuds/MostRemote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaiba notices things which aren't perfect, and Kaiba notices Jounouchi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Perfection

Kaiba enjoys perfection.

The dark richness of his morning espresso. The polished bleach-gleam of his desk. The sloped exactness of his signature inked in his twenty five thousand yen fountain pen. He has cultivated a taste for these things. It is not a taste that came easily.  _Cultivation_ implies effort; skill; dedication. He notices flaws with exquisite, icewhite revulsion.

And Kaiba notices Jounouchi.

He wears the same uniform, unwashed, everyday for a week. It degenerates into scuffed and ugly folds wherever he bends or turns, smelling of pheromones and salt that assail Kaiba's senses even as he sits two desks away. The stickiness of the fabric against Jounouchi's skin can only be imagined, but Kaiba does imagine, and imagines with curling disgust.

The shoes are no better.

When the weather is fine and the students cluster outside before classes commence, Jounouchi shrugs himself onto a wall to chat with his friends and rests his left foot high upon the brick. Kaiba, only in passing, counts the seven little grits of rock stuck between the rubber grooves of Jounouchi's shoes – shoes he never changes, never cleans, shoes with great jagged holes that make Kaiba tap his loafer-clad toes for fear of contamination. The rocks need picking out. The holes need sewing – no, the shoes need incinerating.

Kaiba refuses to dwell at all on the possible state of Jounouchi's socks. He rejects the possibility of threadbare cotton, split toenails tearing through weakened cloth, the shape of his feet, the arc of them, the rough haze of callous beneath the ball extending curved to the heel. The sweat smell and the texture: these he does not think about.

There are so many things he does not think about.

The oil on Jounouchi's fingers when he rides the back of Honda's motorcycle. How it collects between the cracks and callouses of his hands, the black heady scent all about him, how he will blithely smear it about his mouth when eating.

It is disgusting.

And the way he  _chewed_  things. The way he ground molars and saliva into  _everything:_  his nails, his jacket, every writing implement he owns. His pen lids are so bent with gnawing they no longer fit on their pens, and so Jounouchi throws them to the floor to forget about them.

But Kaiba remembers them. He picks them up, repulsed, between thumb and delicate forefinger, and slips them secretly into his pocket to dispose of  _appropriately_.

Which he doesn't.

He has a little drawer full of them now.

When it is very late at night, when Kaiba has been subsisting for days on caffeine and pure neuroses in place of sleep, when he lies alone in bed and his thoughts finally begin to fragment and jumble, the thought of Jounouchi astride him and coming in hot pulses around and inside his mouth prompts him to go lie sleepless and naked in the cold empty bath.

Kaiba is a clean person. Not too clean. He no longer measures his pencils or washes his hands in preparation for washing his hands. He maintains what he is sure qualifies as a reasonable and acceptable level of cleanliness, which is why, when he lost the top to his very expensive and very fine fountain pen, he replaced it with one from the little drawer, one warped and gnashed into a whole new shape, that somehow, quite strangely, fits his pen quite perfectly.


End file.
